Category Archives: Text Editors

BATTLE OF IDE’S : WHICH ONE IS THE BEST?

Explore your editor of choice that allows you to be ultra-productive.

So, you’re in the market for a reliable and functional text editor for your daily needs. There are hundreds of source code editors available in the market that might offer a high level of customization, but it’s very complicated and can become tedious to work with. To name a few- Eclipse, Notepad++, IntelliJ, Atom, Brackets and Sublime Text are few text editors. Among the most popular and useful of them are Atom, Brackets and Sublime Text.

Here’s a thorough comparison that measures these editors upon 6 important parameters and bares the best and worst of each. Though we are comparing open source IDE and commercial IDE’s – our intention is to just look at some important features keeping pricing aside. Right from the interface and customization flexibility to accessibility and stability, we consider everything and have a winner for you. Do not skip ahead, the ending should not be revealed until the time is right.

1. Interface

We all know that text editors aren’t what you’d call pretty, but as you use one over the course of the day, you’ll realize that a clean and efficient user interface is exactly what you need.

Text editors should be easy on the eye and allow for hours of coding sessions.Sublime Text offers the widest options because it lets developers understand the importance of color coding theme customization. Not to say that it’s the best because the other two editors also have a capable range of options which allow you to make your personalized text document.

Overall, it’s not easy choosing a favourite because they all look alike and even have identical interfaces. All three editors offer the best of everything, but brackets seems to be the obvious choice because it apparently provides you with the most consistent cross-platform user experience and is also quite eye pleasing. But even brackets has its flaws as its font rendering doesn’t appear as smooth as other editors. This issue can be solved with a little tweaking though. Atom’s text editor comes in really close second since it has windows aesthetics, which gives it a minor advantage over Sublime Text because it looks out of place.

2. Customization

Since text editors are universally designed to be fully customizable, it becomes a bit difficult to judge them upon this factor. Although Sublime Text and Atom have similar configuration files, Atom has more options integrated into its interface. Documentation is also more organized, and gives your access to the editor’s source in case you need more comprehensive changes or want to work on plug-in development. Brackets is also equipped with an array of options, but although it’s also open source, it’s just not as customizable as Atom andSublime Text.

3. Syntax Support

All four editors have the ability to edit any source files, no matter what kind of syntax they possess. Sublime text, however, clearly wins this category since it offers color coding and support for numerous popular and esoteric languages. Atom and brackets are in the same league as they offer plug-in support even for less-popular syntax.

4. Accessibility

The best text editor is one that allows you to be ultra-productive when you need to be, and allows you to explore new features over time. Keeping that in perspective, brackets is the best choice because it has easy accessibility to most of the options conveniently located on its general user interface. It is also configured in such a way that most of the options are available via the menu without having to modify the configuration files.Sublime text is packed with clever features but its interface makes locating, configuring and implementing these features troublesome to say the least. Atom works better and simpler in this case because of its relatively steeper learning curve compared to brackets.

5. Stability

Sublime text is, by far, the fastest of all the four editors and faces only the extremely rare crash or loss of progress or data. Brackets, on the other hand, has much higher hardware requirements that can cause some very annoying lag and frequent system or process crashes, especially with larger files. We recommend that you’d be best off if you used it to edit HTML, CSS and JavaScript files, and try avoiding complicated SQL files.

6. Native Features and Plugins

How good is your editor is out of the box? Again, Sublime Text wins this one, since it offers a comprehensive range of features. And even if that doesn’t satisfy you, it offers an excess of 2,000 extensions that can enhance functionality. Other contenders follow a more minimalist approach, offering just basic editor that needs to be supplemented by plugins that offer advanced avenues to take. In Atom, for example, even auto complete is an optional plug-in. Brackets doesn’t even offer a split view feature as an option. Sublime text manages to remain nimble and light despite the extra functionality. Atom and brackets offer easier plug-in management, despite their limited standalone functionality.Atom (primarily maintained by GitHub) and Brackets (Product of Adobe) are open source code editors where you can install and use them interchangeably. On other hand, Sublime text is not free, but has unlimited trial.

And the Winner is.

Now that we’ve thoroughly scrutinized the three text editors, we’ve enough evidence to establish that they all come in very close to each other. That being said, Sublime Text continues to remain the editor of choice despite its considerable price. This is mainly because it offers you a quick, stable, and highly-adaptable user interface that ensures a positive user experience.